The fifteen stories in Shena McAuliffe’s We Are a Teeming Wilderness altogether serve as a reliquary honoring bygone things, such as manuals for salesmen hawking silk stockings door to door, and they pay tribute to daily life’s underappreciated minutiae, such as the cosmos of living organisms that compose every human body. These stories travel into the past and into our bloodstreams, transforming the familiar and familiarizing the forgotten.

The opening story, “Real Silk,” incorporates text and illustrations from a silk-stocking sales manual of yesteryear; the door-to-door tribulations of luckless main character Ruben Gilmore; evidences of his mother’s slow spiral into dementia; and the history of silk production. McAuliffe fully commits to each aspect of this complex story, so Ruben’s brooding sense of futility, the scenes that show his mother’s slipping mind, and images from the manual—a depiction, for example, of precisely how a salesmen should plunge his fist into a sample stocking when demonstrating it to a prospective buyer—harmonize with the story’s themes of loss and despair.

Phrenology, another artifact of the past, is at the center of “Benevolence.” Eliza Farnham was a real woman who, like her fictionalized namesake, devoted herself to social reform, eventually becoming women’s warden at Sing Sing in the 1840s. While there, she employed phrenology to “read” the women’s head shapes in order help them find their strengths. “Benevolence” pits a fictional Eliza against the prison’s chaplain in a contest of science versus faith. Both believe the women in their charge can be “cured,” but they disagree on methodology. Eliza’s faith in phrenology is implicated by the criticisms she levies against the chaplain’s religion, charging the story with bittersweet irony.

In the collection’s eponymous story, the human body serves as the relic. “We, the superorganism known as ‘Glenn,’ often envision an infographic of ourself in the shape of a man,” the story begins. The narrator is the amalgam of microorganisms that reside in/on Glenn. The body is a composite of constant exchanges. Some are peaceful: “Sometimes we, Glenn, swap cells with other superorganisms…With Sophie, we cross-fertilize.” Some are apocalyptic: “Once we, Glenn, took a course of penicillin,” but that intervention “slaughtered most of us, along with the invading army,” leaving Glenn “sparsely populated, almost a ghost town” which “those of us who remained began to recolonize.” Some are cautionary and humorous: “But we, Glenn, are also raging xenophobes. In particular, we are nervous about silverware in restaurants.” 

Each story in the collection jumps off from some different found object or idea, delivering it in its fullness while taking us somewhere altogether new. “Two Birds” responds to the polio epidemic of the mid-twentieth century, when swimming pools were considered poisonous but chasing DDT trucks for fun while they sprayed for mosquitoes was an acceptable activity. “The Other Matter” treats Homer’s Odyssey as a found object, turning the tale on its head by giving us a modern-day Laertes whose son’s return disrupts his way of life, raising questions about immigration and who constitutes a family. “This Precarious Hive” takes the form of an art review while still managing to excavate the story behind a bizarre sculpture made of “dentures and other dental material.” 

Every story rediscovers something, bringing the reader along for a joyride. There is wonder and surprise on every page.

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Shena McAuliffe is the author of The Good Echo: A Novel (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and Glass Light Electricity: Essays (University of Alaska, 2020). Her short stories and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah and an MFA in Fiction Writing at Washington University in St. Louis. She grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado, and now lives in Schenectady, NY, where she is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of English at Union College. We Are a Teeming Wilderness won the 2022 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives, writes, and teaches in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her debut story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2023; other work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Millions, Atticus Review, The Westchester Review, Arts & Letters, Gargoyle, Pithead Chapel, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Charlottesville Wine & Country Life, and elsewhere. She earned her fiction MFA from Lesley University, teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA, and reads for The Los Angeles Review.